of the pit tie me limb
to limb, lip to lip, with Judas who sold his master with a kiss, when
they burn me in the seventh hell, I shall remember and rejoice that to
the last he loved me, believed in me, gloried in his love for me. And
God who has been cruel to me in all else, will yet do this thing for
me. He will not let William Douglas know that I deceived him or that
he trusted me in vain."

"But the Vengeance that you spoke of--what of that?" said Sholto,
dwelling upon that which was uppermost in his own thought.

"Aye," said the Lady Sybilla, "that alone can be compassed by me. For
I am bound by a chain, the snapping of which is my death. To him who,
in a far land, devised all these things, to the man who plotted the
fall of the Douglas house--to Gilles de Retz, Marshal of France, I am
bound. But--I shall not die--even you cannot kill me, till I have
brought that head that is so high to the hempen cord, and delivered
the foul fiend's body to the fires of both earth and hell."

"And the Chancellor Crichton--the tutor Livingston--what of them?"
urged Sholto, like a Scot thinking of his native traitors.

The Lady Sybilla waved a contemptuous hand.

"These are but lesser rascals--they had been nothing without their
master and mine. You of the Douglas house must settle with them."

"And why have you returned to this country of Galloway?" said Sholto.
"And why are you thus alone?"

"I am here," said the Lady Sybilla, "because none can harm me with my
work undone. I travel alone because it suits my mood to be alone,
because my master bade me join him at your town of Kirkcudbright,
whence, this very night, he takes ship for his own country of
Brittany."

"And why do you, if as you say you hate him so, continue to follow
him?"

"Ah, you are simple," she said; "I follow him because it is my fate,
and who can escape his doom? Also, because, as I have said, my work is
not yet done."

She relapsed into her former listless, forth-looking, unconscious
regard, gazing through him as if the young man had no existence. He
dropped the rein and the point of his sword with one movement. The
white palfrey started forward with the reins loose on its neck. And as
she went the eyes of the Lady Sybilla were fixed on the distant hills
which hid the sea.

So, leaving Sholto standing by the lakeside with bowed head and abased
sword, the strange woman went her way to work out her appointed task.

But ere the Lady Sybilla disappear